It'll Come a Tide

Next week, we're taking Shiloh to have his development assessed. He's made remarkable progress in the last few months, and we're very excited to see where he places in comparison to last year's assessment.

Shiloh's most recent accomplishments have been in the area of experience-sharing communication. Experience-sharing (ES) is one of the most basic components of interpersonal communication and is usually learned at a very young age. Without it, meaningful communication would not be possible.

Imperative communication (also called instrumental communication) is made up of questions and demands, which can often be scripted and static. Subsequently, it requires little thought or creativity to have an instrumental exchange. In general, people use this type of communication approximately 20% of the time in their day to day interactions. Imperative communication is a necessary part of daily life, but it should not make up the majority of our communication experiences.

On the other hand, we use experience-sharing communication approximately 80% of the time in our daily interactions with others. Sharing experiences allows us to communicate not only about our external world, but our internal world as well. It provides us with the opportunity to talk about our past, present, and future. Not only are we able to share our experiences, but we are able to learn about others' experiences. We can determine what thought process they are using, and how they may be feeling about a shared experience. (Examples of experience-sharing include: thoughts, opinions, emotions, reactions, etc.)

Up to this point, Shiloh has excelled at instrumental communication, but he's been decidedly lacking in ES. For example, he could ask for a cookie to eat in a scripted way (using a static gesture that doesn't change and has an easily anticipated response), but he couldn't express to us how much he enjoys eating the cookie, or comprehend how much we might enjoy a cookie. In fact, he didn't even realize that he needed to share those thoughts with us.

So take a quick step back and look at the developmental milestones at play here: First comes the realization that other people don't know what you're thinking or experiencing. On the heels of that thought comes the realization that you don't know what other people might be thinking or experiencing. Finally, the awareness that through communication, you can effectively share your experiences with others, and they with you, and that this sharing can be very gratifying.

Up to this point, Shiloh's "communication ratio" has been perhaps 5-10% ES, and a whopping 90-95% instrumental. But more recently, he's been pushing a normal percentage (closer to 70%ES/30%I).

Which basically means that now, more than ever, Shiloh has something to say. Since is head is moving rapidly into place, his final obstacle has been to figure out how to express what he's thinking.

There are, of course, a myriad of ways to express oneself. Facial expression, gestures, body language, and prosody (the tone of your voice) are just a few of the many tools we use to get our meaning across, and Shiloh is markedly better at using each of these to express what he's thinking. The next step for him will be to learn to make vocalizations and, eventually, words for the express purpose of communication. Since he's moving rapidly in that direction these last few months, we're expecting a veritable flood of words to come bursting out sometime soon.

Of course, words are not necessarily the final objective. Many people can't speak, but they can still communicate. This helps to clarify our mission: to help Shiloh learn to effectively communicate his experiences, regardless of the way he chooses to do so. And these last few months, it's become obvious that we are getting closer and closer to accomplishing that goal.

These are very exciting times!